Southland reacts to Nigerian schoolgirls’ abductions

Students from the Nigerian Student Association at the University of California, Riverside hold a vigil condemning the kidnapping of more than 200 teenage girls from a school in Northern Nigeria by an Islamic extremist group. From left, Krystal Hemphill, Bola Adeniran, Simisoluwa Ogunleye, Ogechi Opara and Alex Uche.

Global outrage over the kidnapping of more than 200 teenage girls from a boarding school in northern Nigeria has sparked a wave of demonstrations from the South Bay to the San Fernando Valley to the Inland Empire.

On Monday, a prayer vigil will be held beginning at 7 p.m. at the International Christian Center in Hawthorne. Organizers say vigils will be held there daily at the same time until the girls are returned.

“I cannot even fathom going to school to pick up my daughter and somebody gives me some cockamamie story that somebody came to the school and took them,” said Nigerian activist and Rancho Palos Verdes resident Lara Okunubi, who is spreading word of the vigil.

“Honestly for me, there are two columns in life. There’s the column of things that you can change and there’s the column of things that you cannot change. ... We have to stand up for these girls.”

Muslim extremist gunmen kidnapped the girls after storming the Chibok Government Girls Secondary School on April 15, setting it ablaze and herding the students away in pickup trucks.

A second report has surfaced of 11 more girls kidnapped from another region of Nigeria. As of Friday, 276 schoolgirls were being held captive, at least two died of snakebites and about 20 others were ill, according to Associated Press reports.

The Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, whose name means “Western education is sinful,” is against educating girls and women, and has threatened to sell the girls into slavery.

At UC Riverside last week, Nigerian student Simisoluwa Ogunleye draped herself in black and stood beside a table displaying photos of mothers screaming, crying and praying for their young daughters’ return.

For female students such as Ogunleye, 21, who helped organize a vigil Wednesday on the Riverside campus, the mass kidnappings were personal.

She started school in Nigeria, but left at the age of 5 when her parents won a lottery to immigrate to the United States,

“It hit close to home. ... If we weren’t fortunate enough to come to America, we would have stayed in Nigeria. So it could have happened to us,” said Ogunleye, a member of the Nigerian Students Association on the Riverside campus.

Her mother, having suffered similar discrimination in Nigeria, taught Ogunleye to value education.

“The Nigerian association is mostly girls. We know how much we value our education. We would hate to see this happen, for somebody to come and abduct us,” she said.

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The Los Angeles and Inland areas have the highest concentrations of Nigerians in Southern California, said Solomon Williams Obotetukudo, spokesman of the Rancho Cucamonga-based Nigerian-American Public Affairs Committee, a national social welfare and political group.

The group sent a letter to the U.S. State Department asking for intervention and is mobilizing forces nationally and in Southern California to stage events spreading awareness.

Condemning the kidnappings was the Washington D.C.-based National Council of Nigerian Muslim Organizations, which held a news conference last week speaking against the extremists and their treatment of girls.

“They are a bunch of criminals,” said spokesman Kola Akinade. “There’s nowhere in the Koran that supports what they’re doing. ... There’s nothing in my religion that says I should not send my daughter to get an education.”

Simi Valley resident Taiwo Fanu, president of Moremi Women, a Southern California-based Nigerian group devoted to fostering Nigerian-American culture, is holding meetings to organize protests. She said the issue is on everyone’s mind, and the community simply needs to organize.

Woodland Hills mother of four Amaka Ada Akudinobi, a native of Nigeria, is not waiting for direction.

She held up signs and chanted slogans at a rally in Carson last week, called the office of South Bay Rep. Maxine Waters, sent an email to U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer and signed a petition intended for the White House.

Her Facebook avatar says “Chibok girls” and “#234” — the African country’s international calling code. And she’s trying to persuade everyone she knows to post similar avatars this Mother’s Day.

“We have to take a stand for humanity; we can’t fold our hands just because we live out here and say it’s not our problem,” said Akudinobi, a family law attorney. “To think of a child being abducted that way, it blows my mind. It brings me to tears.”